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Here is a collection of recent health news you can use.  We’re focusing on whole-body health. Click on the links to read more about each topic.

Give your spirits a lift: Now that the days are long, it’s easy to spend time outdoors—and here’s a reason why you should: Just five minutes of exercise in a natural setting boosts your mood and sense of personal well-being. Go for a walk, jog, bike ride or run in a park or on a tree-lined road. Even working in a garden counts—so go outside and give your spirits a lift!

The gym beats walking: If fitness is your goal, you’ll get the biggest returns from time spent at the gym compared to walking. A study compared a daily pedometer walking program with four-day a week supervised gym visits and found that, after six months, the gym goers had greater improvements in fitness. The catch: More of the walkers met their goal of walking 10,000 steps a day—92 percent. Only 77 percent of the gym goers kept to the program. The gym workout was harder; the gym goers lowered their lower blood pressure and improved their ability to turn oxygen into energy. Both groups had a significant reduction in body mass, waist circumference, and resting heart rate.

Strength fights diabetes: If you’re making dietary changes to control or stave off diabetes, you might want to add bran—and muscle. Researchers found that diabetic women who ate a diet rich in bran-containing foods had a 35 percent lower risk of death over the 26 years of their study. Bran is found in whole wheat, oats, rye, rice and other grains. Researchers also wondered if thinness alone could prevent diabetes—probably not, they learned. They found that people with low muscle mass had higher levels of insulin resistance than people who had greater muscle mass and strength–it didn’t matter if the subjects were overweight or thin. The conclusion: Dieting to be thin is not enough to prevent diabetes—you must exercise to maintain and build strong muscles, too!

Go ahead, go nuts: If you’re cutting back on the amount of processed meat you eat because cold cuts, bacon and other processed meats contribute to heart disease, consider replacing that animal protein with nuts. Researchers found nuts lower bad LDL cholesterol, reducing risk of heart disease. Eating just 2.4 ounces of nuts a day—of any kind—was enough for a healthy effect and the more nuts people ate, the greater the benefit.